Before heading out for the weekend, let’s discuss Jeffrey Epstein, America’s best connected political pedophile, shall we?

If you haven’t heard of him, Epstein’s the super-sleazy Palm Beach billionaire who was busted some time back and convicted for conspiring to bring underage foreign girls to his estates in the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Or as his 2008 plea deal put it, to ”knowingly and willfully conspiring with others known and unknown to… persuade, induce, or entice minor females to engage in prostitution.”

I’ve previously written about Epstein’s ties to Bill Clinton and to Donald Trump. Neither Clinton nor Trump look come out of it looking good, to put it mildly, but in this case Clinton looks a lot worse.

“Flight logs show Bill Clinton traveled at least 10 times on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the ‘Lolita Express,’ by tabloids, and he is widely reported to have visited Little St. James, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands,” I’ve previously written. “That’s where, according to attorneys for Epstein’s victims, many of the worst crimes against minors were committed by Epstein and friends who traveled there with him.”

In a 2011 interview with her attorneys, Virginia Roberts, one of the teenagers preyed upon by Epstein, said he had told her he had “compromising” information on Bill Clinton and that the former president “owes me a favor.”

Oh yeah, and by the way Epstein donated to the Clinton Foundation and multiple Democratic Party causes before and after being convicted for pedophilia.

Lately, however, the party has reportedly shunned Epstein. Indeed, he’s so toxic, recently released emails show, that Team Obama rejected the idea of having Epstein’s chief attorney, Roy Black, host a fundraiser. Black, by the way, is perhaps best known for winning an acquittal for William Kennedy Smith for allegedly raping a Palm Beach teenager. Following that trial Black married a juror in the case.

Federal and state investigators amassed a mountain of evidence against Epstein, but in the end Black and his other attorneys were able to draft and negotiate a bizarre plea deal. The terms of the agreement, which was secret at the time, capped damages against Epstein — reportedly worth about $2 billion — to between $50,000 and $150,000, depending on what year he had abused the girl, an attorney with direct knowledge of the case told me.

The agreement also barred victims from seeking any future financial redress. Roberts and a number of other “Jane Does” — Epstein’sunderage victims— are currently suing to overturn the settlement. A number of attorneys with ties to the Obama administration were involved in negotiating the deal, which was highly criticized and never publicly explained. (The astonishing story of the “sweetheart” plea deal is laid out in this article in the Palm Beach Daily News.)

Fourth, I’ve been looking into the Epstein affair for over a year. I’ve interviewed dozens of sources in Florida, including several of the Miami-area lawyers for the Jane Does, and have a lot of material in my files.

Interviews with key sources, documents and previously published accounts show that Epstein’s closest friends and collaborators included Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of disgraced British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, and Frenchman Jean-Luc Brunel. The latter ran a modeling agency called Karin, which is based in Paris but also has offices in New York, Miami, and Brazil.

Brunel, whose role in the Epstein case has been covered by Jezebel and others, has a long and sordid record of abusing and pimping out young women. Back in 1988, 60 Minutes aired a segment that featured a dozen models who said they had been sexually assaulted by Brunel.

Craig Pyes, an associate producer and chief investigator of the segment, said various witnesses told him that Brunel was “heavily into cocaine and sex with young girls,” and that he set-up parties for “his rich playboy friends” and invited girls to weekend parties that “operated as meat markets for older men.” Several models told 60 Minutes they had been drugged and raped by Brunel or his friends.

What’s especially outrageous, attorneys tell me, is that neither Brunel nor Maxwell ever testified in Epstein’s case. Both fled the United States on the eve of their respective depositions with the flimsiest of excuses. (Page Six recently reported that Maxwell was finally going to be forced to testify in the ongoing Jane Doe trial, but I haven’t been able to confirm that.)

Brunel lined up underage girls for Epstein’s Virgin Islands hideaway through his modeling agency, several of the victims’ attorneys I interviewed said. A private investigator involved in the case backed those accounts.

He said that Karin had two departments, one that was legal and sent girls to New York and elsewhere, and an illegal side that recruited underage girls for Epstein and other global clients. “They lured young girls [to Orgy Island], mostly from small towns in Brazil and Eastern Europe – with the promise of a fat modeling contract,” this person said. “They told them they’d go to the island and meet the head of the modeling agency. Instead, they were coerced into pleasuring Epstein, Brunel and their guests.”

This source said Epstein’s entire sex procurement operation was laid out to him by a former Karin bookkeeper, a Cuban-American woman who worked for the modeling agency’s Miami office during the relevant period.